Prize Recipient

Mark George Raizen
University of Texas at Austin

Citation:

"For his pioneering advances in the experimental study of atom optics, and especially for the insightful connections he has developed between this discipline and studies of chaotic dynamics, condensed matter physics, and dissipative quantum systems."

Background:

Dr. Raizen received a B.Sc. in mathematics from Tel-Aviv University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship for two years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder. He moved to the University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in 1991. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1996.

During the past seven years, Dr. Raizen and his group have been working in the field of atom optics. The main focus of their reseach has been to study how quantum mechanics suppresses classical chaos, by a mechanism known as dynamical localization. Recent work in his group has studied the effects of dissipation in going from quantum to classical behavior.

Dr. Raizen has received an NSF Young Investigator Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and a Sid W. Richardson Foundation Chair Fellowship. He has published over fifty scientific papers, and was elected in 1997 as a Fellow of the American Physical Society.